And The Child Shall Lead Us

Well, now that we've taken “God” out of the equation... He, he, he... No promises though that It will stay out.

I have two “Happiness Economy” posts waiting to be edited. People have been requesting them and please know that they will be posted very shortly. However, some might find the following to be an interesting and semi-related tangent to the ideas I have been expressing in that other thread.

I want to return to another human component to my journey.

I have another wonderful friend who keeps a practical sense of forward momentum and I want to comment a little about this very helpful attitude of hers. It will be my intention to attempt an illustration of just how important her spirit of “Sleep well...OK, it's time to get up and resume the suffering—because we ARE getting there,” is.

She has been where I was this summer, but suffered much more than I. She is the mother of a very bright and intelligent young son, who I had the pleasure of meeting a couple weeks ago and really developed a fondness for. Would it be a surprise to say that I saw a bit of myself in him?

Their interaction with each other was like a couple of friends—a team, until the kid in him came out to ask for this and that, as we walked around a certain store. Happily, with a natural air of forthrightness, she would just say, “No, you don't need that,” or “yes, I'll think about it and we'll talk about a time when we can come back.” He was SO good at accepting her judgment of the situation, that it seemed to me at the time, that they functioned as a kind of business partnership. No doubt, they must have their disagreements and uncomfortable times. Still, the impression I came away with was one of a mother with great confidence in herself and a son who felt this aspect of her, instinctively letting it replace his own unsure desires.

When she was abandoned and penniless, he was just a baby. Bear in mind that her fall had nothing to do with substance abuse or any irresponsibility on her part.  Rather, it was her faith in a husband whom she assumed would be there for her and their new family.  But, after supporting him for seven years -and putting him through school - getting pregnant after five years of fertility treatment, four miscarriages and two surgeries, her husband asked her to leave her job (knowing full well he was going to leave her), cold-heartedly reasoning that he would have had to pay more in child support.  She was seven months pregnant when he forwarded the mail and stopped paying the bills, then he took off with his girlfriend.

Things got so bad that her inability to find enough food for herself, meant that breast feeding was just not in the cards. No male on this planet could possibly understand the psychological torment of loving a hungry baby you can't even feed from your own body. In my mind – because I was not in touch with her back then – I have the image of my frequently-visited bench at Mill Creek Park, occupied by a mother and her little baby.

In this image I see her unable to give him what he is crying for—the life-giving sustenance he needs and she needs for him. I see her peer down into his bright eyes and him look back at her through his tears. Knowing what I now know about them, I see (perhaps only in symbol—for no child can help himself from feeling sad in his hunger), him stop crying and smile as their selves blend in the open air the same way they had when he was attached to her in the womb. Could it be that the younger we are, the more of the future we sense? And his would turn out to be a future of needs fulfilled...and then some.

Growing up in school (in Yarmouth, Maine—a preppy little coastal town), she and I were friends but on different paths at the time. Still I recall her as friendly, immaculately dressed, highly intelligent and very well-spoken.

There is a kind of “economic relativity” whose formula might describe how psychologically hard one hits the “bottom” when falling from a stand point of some degree of comfort and security into the depths of hunger and destitution. It is similar to the effects of physical gravity. In physics this is called the “impact force.”

[And for those who are are even more turned off by math, than by religion, feel free to skip over the following, until you see, “In other words”...]

In the more wishy-washy, non-scientific, sense that I am proposing, it is between the “psychological mass” of the falling object (the “object” being a person's cultural expectations about an acceptable standard of living for themselves—from past experience), the height of the fall (arbitrarily assigned by whatever amount of material loss is “felt”), and the mass-area that the object it falls against (the “bottom,” loosely referring to the psychological “limit” that one can fall to; being something as infinitesimally close to non-existence (i.e. death = 0) as possible, without ever reaching this limit.

This is only a playful and figurative (not to mention probably inaccurate) concept, since the more one examines the intervening variables, the more error one finds in the concept itself. In other words, please take this with a ¼ teaspoon of salt. Still, it might describe—though weakly, for those of us who have fallen in such a way, how we feel about “hitting bottom,” relative to where we might have started from, socioeconomically. And it goes something like this...

For simplicity-sake I will use very basic assumptions. We might recall the physical formula for impact force as illustrated at livephysics.com...

As an object falls from rest, its gravitational potential energy is converted to kinetic energy. Consider a mass m which is falling vertically under the influence of gravity.


Object is falling from rest, therefore initial kinetic energy is zero. Once the object hit on the ground, height is zero, therefore no potential energy at ground level.


Initial PE = Final KE



Impact velocity just before the impact is


From work-energy principle, change in the kinetic energy of an object is equal to the net work done on the object.



For a straight-line collision, the total work done is equal to the average force of impact times the distance traveled during the impact.

Average impact force x Distance traveled = Change in kinetic energy


Total work done = Kinetic energy just before object hit the ground


Impact force

Well to save myself from a dozen complaints about “irrelevance and unnecessary complexity,” I will consider only the bolded statement above, restated and dumbed-down, for my purposes as...

Average psychological impact force (Favg) = Change in state of mind (ΔMstate), divided by the Distance fallen from a resting state of satisfaction (d) , or, ...

Favg = ΔMstate/d

In other words, when one starts from higher level of personal expectation, one suffers a greater degree of personal disappointment and psychological defeatism.

In all likelihood, the typical Yarmouth, Maine-raised child who is raised in relative socioeconomic comfort, and then falls into poverty and depression as an adult, will have a harder time, psychologically, than the typical Bangladeshi-raised child who starts out and tends to remain in that low or lower socioeconomic state. Even when the Bangladeshi falls, the distance is not as great and the impact upon that person is not as potentially defeating as the Yarmoutheshi. That little impact crater seen in the diagram above is not as deep and is easier to climb out of.

Now, I fully understand that there are many logical problems with the assertion I have just related. And I do not in ANY way want to give the impression that the habitually dirt-poor person is actually better off than the originally-richer one who finds themselves dirt-poor, after existing in a much higher standard of living. BOTH are suffering. Both deserve a basic dignity that humanity is not consciously (through a cessation of greed, violence, selfishness, national pride and ignorance, etc.) yet able to afford to everyone on this planet. But I do want to make the point that it seems that ANY AND ALL average (discounting any genetic predispositions for making their own lives harder than they need to be) humans would be equally impacted by starting with plenty and then falling into abject poverty.  And this is true, independent of race, ethnicity or gender.

I think this is a very important point. What it shows me is that when we, in the so-called, “First World,” promote the spread of the high philosophical ideal, that we call, “Democracy,” we are deceiving ourselves and standing on an illusion. And we are just primitive enough still to think that this ideal – which, by the way, we don't even practice correctly here in “the lands of opportunity” (there has NEVER been a truly democratic society) – can be forced upon whom we deem "less-democratic" cultures.

We have equated things that should not be equated: Representative Government = Democracy (RULE by the people), Democracy = Free Market, Free Market = Capitalism, Capitalism = Opportunity, and Opportunity = General Prosperity. These five red herrings are terrible and terribly misleading, and misunderstood assumptions.

Why are they “terrible”? Because, they only benefit the groups and individuals who use them as a justification, and thus a means, to do things like spill blood and replace it with petroleum, lower expectations for originality of thought as a way of perpetuating conformity—ostensibly and euphemistically, renamed “social stability,” and accept the suffering of some—that some others might prosper, locking up, persecuting and even killing anyone who speaks up against this equating.

We often sit back and armchair-philosophize about our First World benevolence toward less-fortunate peoples in distant lands - people who have significantly (unfairly?) less - by patting ourselves on the back about our “Democratic” ideals. It is quickly forgotten that it was our particular, historical Western (American?) happenstance (as I discussed in the “Happiness Economy” thread) that allowed for the unprecedented technological, military, industrial—and thus, economic, growth, that we enjoyed during the last century that gave us our leg up. It was NOT the supposed superiority of our modern philosophies.

And, even as we watch the crumbling of loosely-built, worldwide markets all around us – while we keep running to Walmart for more duct tape to tighten them up – we treat the inevitable ever-NEW, yet consciously-unforeseen, changing social and economic needs of our developing global culture as fads, anomalies, and flashes in the historical pan. If we can just tweak this cog or that gear, it will all come right back to the (impossible, post WWII) American Dream, as a World Dream: three car garages, ½ acres of green lawns for everyone, reasonable mortgages, steady employment, opportunity for entrepreneurial success, access to emergency services, well-equipped police protection, store isles filled with fresh produce, plenty of alcohol, cigarettes, red meat, coffee and candy, office supplies and salad shooters... We know what we expect! And now we want the world to expect it too.

Unfortunately, though, the natural resources needed to make sure that every McDonald's meal comes with paper bags, cardboard burger boxes, plastic cups with straws, and a hand-full of napkins—all of which is THROWN AWAY in the same visit; the fossil fuels needed to manufacture and transport that packaging to the restaurant and then from there to the landfill, to power the appliances that store and cook the food, heat and cool the restaurant, keep the engines of drive-through customers running while they slowly move through the service window; the arsenic, silicon, lead, copper, gold and plastic of every digital device used to keep orders flowing and numbers computing, are not infinite.  

The products DO degrade and depreciate over time, necessitating their own continual replacement. Therefore, any “increased efficiency” in the process ACTUALLY speeds the waste and exploitative potential of that same process. We are fools to think that “innovation” under the umbrella of such static and inflexible energy and economic models is “growth.”  Ripping open the ground and sucking up what we find there, so Americans, Europeans and the Japanese can make fast food packaging and cellphones that become obsolete in six months is imeasurably selfish and irresponsible.  It just makes us feel really good...temporarily.  It is our heroin.  Terence McKenna called it a "junky-mentality."  And (paraphrasing McKenna) we are willing to pay for our junk.  But if the countries we exploit don't want to sell it to us, we must be willing to break into their house and take it from them.  Because, no matter what, it is going into our good right arm.  That's the plan.

My friend has seen the rotten other side of the pretty, wooden boardwalk that suspends our delicate feet above an uncertain landscape of shifting shapes, swimming in the darkness below us. I have seen a bit of it myself. It really seems to take a “fall” to reverse the pride that came before it—if that can even be done.  Well, in my friend's case and possibly mine too, it CAN be done.  And maybe it should be a requirement(?).

When her son mentioned to me that he likes to read books, draw comics, work at setting up a “study” in his bedroom, likes sports but doesn't feel confident about his ability to become a sports star, uses his imagination freely, and really listens to what his mother tells him, I had to smile inwardly as I smiled outwardly. When he – of his own volition – called himself a “geek,” I saw my own adult interests and was suddenly not ashamed. When he mentioned projects that he wanted to do and the people he wanted to reach with these projects, I glimpsed into future of all humanity.


But, when, upon our first meeting, as we stood in front of each other and introduced ourselves, he thought nothing of wrapping his arms around my waist and resting his head against me...I knew that our children are here to save us, and not just replace us. I foresaw that the love, brilliance and promise there; that waiting in his little heart, being supported, encouraged and inspired by his stalwart, well-experienced and realistic mother (the same one who once sat with him upon the figurative park bench of his infancy, as they shared a common hunger and despair), is a Power beyond the greatest and largest machines of industry; beyond the power imprisoned by the nuclear forces of the atom.  I beheld, at that moment – even the generations before us set up a system that had the potential of destroying the world we now live in—with little concern about looting the future of their grandchildren, in order to supply the comfort of their present – the profoundly positive force contained this young boy, along with his young associates and friends, is as unstoppable as the sunrise tomorrow. It IS THE answer.


And I counted myself among the most privileged of all men, to hold that non-material treasure in my own arms, and I gave it a place in my own heart; a heart that was broken and sick—but, through the leadings of a child was able to be made whole again.  Our children are FAR more precious than we have ever dared to think.